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He wanted to go after shootings, and he knew that gun possession and drug dealing were intertwined. "It's relatively hard for a uniformed patrolman to catch someone carrying drugs,'' Maple says. "But as we'd seen, it's easy to catch someone for an open can of beer on the street." Thus what the cops call "beer and piss patrol" became a tactic for apprehending more serious criminals. "Your open beer lets me check your ID," says Maple. "Now I can radio the precinct for outstanding warrants or parole violations. Maybe I bump against that bulge in your belt; with probable cause, I can frisk you." Civil libertarians have been screaming, but shootings, gun murders and other signs of firearms use are down--proof, Bratton says, that thugs are leaving the guns at home.
This is a significant departure from the service-oriented "community policing'' introduced during the Dinkins administration, when beat cops were encouraged to be problem solvers for a neighborhood. (Now the patrolmen funnel these issues to their precinct commanders.) The Bratton version of community policing is to devise strategies that target specific criminal behavior. Special squads are dispatched to hit high-crime hot spots, while others track down illegal guns. Precinct detectives now interrogate suspects not just about the crimes they may have committed but also about other gun and drug dealers they know. Eventually, Bratton believes, all the policies begin to dovetail, and crime drops through the floor. "Most criminals commit multiple crimes," he says. "We're processing crime data faster than ever before, so we can identify patterns early and stop them after three crimes instead of 30. If you do that city-wide, you'll knock the crime rate down."
But what some rank-and-file cops refer to as "Bratton taking the cuffs off us" has increased force, abuse and discourtesy complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board 30%. Many of the complaints have never been investigated by the CCRB and are impossible to evaluate. Still, some New Yorkers fear the N.Y.P.D.'s new swagger. "A lot of people aren't comfortable with this style," says Kelly. "It goes to the question of what kind of policing we want in America. You can probably shut down just about all crime, if you're willing to burn down the village to save it. Eventually, I think, there will be a backlash, and crime will go back up. But Bill will be gone by then."
Asked about persistent rumors that he'll soon jump ship, Bratton says even if he stays only another year, "that's enough time to consolidate our gains, so that long after I'm gone, my successors won't retreat." As for Kelly's burning-village imagery, Giuliani and Bratton dismiss such talk as sour grapes, pointing to the benefits of reduced crime being enjoyed by those hardest hit by it: Latinos and African Americans in the poorest parts of New York City. "The crime reduction has been across the board, in every neighborhood," says Bratton. That means four fewer people killed on the wealthy Upper East Side, but 51 fewer killed in war-torn East New York. The people who live there have noticed the change. "It used to be that I was throwing myself on the floor with my son all the time," says Elisandra Beltran, 27, "because of the bullets flying through my window. But now I haven't seen a bullet hole in a year." She doesn't much care who gets the credit, just as long as the bullets don't fly anymore.